Engineering Citi Field - Home of New York Mets
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New York Mets Citi Field, New York

Citi Field in New York City’s borough of Queens is home to the New York Mets baseball team. The award-winning, 45,000-capacity stadium includes a restaurant with field-view seating, a New York Mets interactive museum and a Hall of Fame.

Location

  • New York, USA

Client

  • Queens Ballpark Company

Architect

Project status

  • Completed in 2009

We were the structural engineer for this word-class facility, which uses large cantilevers to create a vertically stacked seating arrangement, offering improved sightlines and an intimate, close-to- the- action feeling. The architecture is based on Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers until the 1950s.

Intimate atmosphere for a retro baseball stadium

To achieve the stadium’s ‘retro’ look, most of the support steel was left exposed. The seating bowl, stairs and field walls are made from pre-cast concrete.

The site’s poor soil presented a challenge for our team, calling for piles to support not only the superstructure but also the ground-level floor slab and plaza area. It also increased seismic risk to the complex, while the need for open concourses restricted use of steel bracing. We overcame this by using powerful concrete shear walls around the stair towers to provide additional support and incorporating special concentrically braced frames.

The project was delivered in 36 months, in time for the Mets’ April 2009 home opener, a timeline requiring extremely close coordination across the design team. We used building information modelling (BIM) to coordinate the stadium’s structural and architectural design.

The project won the American Council of Engineering Companies’ Diamond Award for Engineering Excellence in 2009.

Other challenges that we have overcome